@khurshid-alam had mentioned that he would like to try nemo for 18.10 so I am relying heavily on many of his driections atm.

That decision makes perfect sense to me, including the fact that it’s for 18.10, and not 18.04. I guess the question is how consistent Nautilus will be on Unity7 on 18.04. I haven’t tried it yet though.

I personally really like to use my current 16.04 setup: Ubuntu MATE defaut apps on Unity7 and Nemo, and I look forward to use this in 18.04.

I do wonder if Nemo’s patches needed for Unity integration will still allow it to work on Cinnamon (which is, as far as I know, in the Ubuntu repos, if someone wants to use it).

Caja isn’t pinned to Unity’s dash by default on the image you built (even though it seems to behave correct if I do pin it, even though it doesn’t have the expected shortcuts when you right click on it in the dash);

Killing caja on the terminal and execute caja --force-desktop means caja won’t integrate with global menu anymore. However, I didn’t test if caja --force-desktop --no-default-window would work as intended though.

Right-clicking on the desktop and select to change background doesn’t seem to work, which means mate-appearance-properties isn’t installed, as @Wimpress explained before.

I think all this stuff is kinda expected at this point, but I felt I should point it out, since it stands out almost immediately.

If you have time perhaps you can put up a list of terminal commands in a chronological order as @wimpress itemed out in this thread so as I could attempt another caja install into the ISO during this process. I certainly missed a few steps in the previous attempt.

The first two lines intend to fix this, since mime types are going to be altered system-wide:

Wimpress:

The default mime type file associations are in /usr/share/applications/defaults.list which is a symlink to /etc/gnome/defaults.list. If MATE applications are to be used that will need modifying and Ubuntu Unity would need to ship their own version of defaults.list in a settings package

Then I add or replace mime types in /usr/share/applications/defaults.list accordingly, but I don’t know if this is the proper way to do it.

I’ve added a unity-specific shortcut for mate-system-monitor and hid the computer, home, volumes and trash icons in the desktop, since they make no sense to be there for unity.

Also, do note that removing gnome-calculator also removes unity-scope-calculator, which I have no idea if it can be patched to work with mate-calc.

Theming for the MATE terminal isn’t working as intended, so I altered it manually to be easier on the eyes while testing. I’ve since tested with other themes in the repo, and it seems that Ambiance is the only one that doesn’t work properly on MATE terminal. It seems the issue has to do with the fact that Ambiance and Radiance have never been properly patched to support MATE. I talk about it in more detail here.

@Wimpress am I missing something? I didn’t try to replicate your experiment with mate-user-share because I don’t know how to do it.

On a side note, I just noticed nautilus isn’t patched to display a “full global menu” anymore, which is what I imagine will end up happening to all other GNOME apps.

There isn’t that much difference no Both have HUD, global menu, etc… One difference is that with Unity a window, when maximized, has its title bar merged with the top bar, I’m not aware that this is the case in MATE? Also, the Dash is rather different.

@popey As a non-technical user, I think that CSD apps and the eventual removal of headerbar patches (not sure if it’s already happening in 18.04) on those that usually ship by default in Ubuntu (as they are no longer necessary in GNOME) are a more drastic change for Unity users than MATE apps, hence my suggestion to use them, including Caja.

I do get that this still represents a big change, but long term, as GNOME continues to evolve, I think it’s best for Unity7 to stick to usage paradigms of its pre-CDS era, and MATE represents that.

I’ve been using Unity as my primary DE on Ubuntu 17.10 (and testing Unity on 18.04), and Nautilus (with CSD) just feels wrong. So, provided Caja would work properly, I hope that Ubuntu Unity 18.04 will ship with Caja instead of Nautilus.

No. Not at the moment. Now Unity session pulls gtk3-nocsd. So no csd in unity session. You should try latest ubuntu-unity-amd64 iso

Thanks much! Yep, I tested the Ubuntu Unity ISO a few months ago. I’ll try installing from it again soon.

Right now, I’m testing vanilla Ubuntu 18.04, but with Unity (and gtk3-nocsd) installed from Universe. Nautilus with gtk3-nocsd works okay, but looks a bit ugly. Even so, I suppose that, ugly or not, as others have suggested, it may be better to stick with Nautilus and other GNOME apps, which would keep consistency with previous releases.